Hardeeville receives $500,000 for library

Hardeeville City Council accepted a $500,000 grant for a new library from the South Carolina Department of Commerce at its Nov. 21 meeting.

The community development block grant was awarded through a program operated by the Lowcountry Council of Governments, city manager Bob Nanni said.

Before Nanni arrived in Hardeeville two years ago, the city made several requests for the grant. It was denied each time.

“When I got here one of the first things I wanted to do was to figure out why they failed to receive the grant for the library,” said Nanni. “We had a meeting with our staff and went to Columbia and talked to the Department of Commerce (DOC) and asked, ‘Why are we not getting this grant?’

“We went through a lot of detail and took good notes. Then we created another grant application and removed the obstacles the DOC had. Their biggest issue was the location of the library, so we got that changed. Basically, we worked out all the bugs, resubmitted and scaled the proposal back a bit.”

A previous application called for the library to be on the same property as the historic Heyward House. Under the revised plan, the $850,000 library will be located at 20 Main Street where the Jasper County Satellite Tax Assessor’s office sits.

Nanni said a new library is a necessity because the current Hardeeville library is antiquated and undersized.

“Now we’re down to a project that’s about $850,000,” Nanni said. “We will get $500,000 from the grant, and what’s left will be paid by county and city. In the meantime, we are on the search for more partners financially because we are going to build the library but we also need to put furniture, fixtures and equipment inside.”

Council also received an update on the city’s branding initiative.

The three companies vying for a chance to brand Hardeeville (Arnett Muldrow and Associates, E. Boineau and Company and The Brandon Agency) provided council with more information about how they would handle the project.

Nanni hopes council will choose a company at its Dec. 4 workshop. He said the project will give Hardeeville an identity, helping local government and the community, both residential and commercial.

“At this point, it’s really the council’s decision,” said Chris Damgen, Hardeeville’s downtown development manager. “The council needed a little bit more information to help them make a decision.

“Hopefully, though, they’ll have a workshop next Wednesday and we hope we can get one of them to make a motion to approve one company over the others. That will be in place by December. All three, though, are very good groups in the running. They all offer their own strengths.”

In other business, council held a second reading of an updated business license ordinance intended to streamline the permitting of licenses and reduce fees for the next three years.